


Let Us Compare Mythologies

by Abradystrix



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Community: rs_games, M/M, Poetry, Pre-Prisoner of Azkaban, R/S Games 2017, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-13
Updated: 2017-10-13
Packaged: 2019-01-10 08:43:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12295542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Abradystrix/pseuds/Abradystrix
Summary: R/S Games 2017 - Day 11 - Team RemusRemus contemplates the time before, against his better judgement.





	Let Us Compare Mythologies

**Author's Note:**

> **Team:** Remus  
>  **Title:** Let Us Compare Mythologies  
>  **Rating:** M  
>  **Warnings:** Angst, Smut  
>  **Genres:** Mild smut  
>  **Word Count:** 1700  
>  **Summary:** Remus contemplates the time before, against his better judgement. Canon compliant, pre-POA.  
>  **Notes:** With thanks to picascribit for the promotion and proliferation of the idea that Remus and Sirius are Leonard Cohen fans, a notion which helped to develop this fic and inspired the use of ‘Satan in Westmount’, taken from the titular Cohen collection. Beta-ed by the lovely BH, who always indulges my proclivity for slash.  
>  **Prompt:** : #95 - Picture: A stack of old books, with a jar on top.  
> 

Coated in that thin sheen of familiar anxious sweat, he is abruptly awake and his heart is hammering. He struggles to find his bearings in the small, dingy room that has been a semblance of home for the last year. The moon is half spent in the sky, and as he slowly brings himself to sit up, hands shaking, he watches it through a crack in the curtains as his anchor, rooting him here and now, in time and space. It’s 1993. He’s somewhere in the North.

It hadn’t been a bad dream. Far from it. But the abrupt awakening and sharp turn have rattled him, alongside the lingering memories of that night. It is the same dream that has been plaguing him over the past year. It has been twelve years now since he has even seen him, let alone touched him.

And yet...

_The vivid memory of those hands, running all over his body. The undercurrent of boyish tenacity and enthusiasm, the gasps, the intoxicating scent of him and the thrumming of their hearts as he felt himself slide inside completely. The yearning in this throat, keening and raw, the rush of release, and the cry of satisfaction as the hot need spilled out and over his stomach and they caught their breath, elated and unafraid, hands entwined and curtains drawn._

It wasn’t the first time for either of them. But it was the first time since, and that had lent an intensity to the whole experience that he could never really forget.

 

Remus shakes his head, like a man wringing water from his ears, punchdrunk on the vivid potency of these memories. Leaning his head back against the cold wall, he closes his eyes, reminding himself that those years are long spent, and the man he had once known is long gone.

His breathing slows as he opens the drawer beside his bed and observes the objects there. The paraphernalia of another life, the flotsam of his existence and their time in the sun, long gone and sorely felt. He reaches first for the bundle of parchment, bound together like some kind of futile mausoleum of words he’ll never really say, immortalised in letters he will never send. 

> _Dear Sirius,_
> 
> _I can’t even wonder where you are as I know only too well. I can’t even begin to wonder how you feel, as I have no idea, not anymore. I can only guess and think and remember. And I try not to…_
> 
> _Dear Sirius,_
> 
> _It was your birthday yesterday. I thought of you and then I hated myself a little more for it._
> 
> _Dear Sirius,_
> 
> _~~I miss  
>  I love~~ _
> 
> _What happened?_

His gaze is drawn inexorably to the front page of the Prophet, cast aside on the bedside table, wild eyes and snarling mouth staring out from the frontispiece. He tries to ignore the pounding deep in his stomach, the burning in his throat and the heat in his cheeks as he wonders where in the world Sirius has gone, what has driven him to run, now, after all of these years. He doesn’t wonder how. He cannot let himself because to let himself wonder is to let himself accept that he knows, deep down, and to accept is to lie and to protect and to love, and he’d have to be even more of a monster to do that now, after everything. His mind drifts inescapably to the time that came before.

 

There had been a first time, of course. That recurred less frequently in his dreams. His memories of that time were faded round the edges, fumbling touches and anxious whispers, a sense of mutual nervousness, excitement and a beautifully awkward union.

What he remembered was _after_ : staring, startled at one another, unsure of what had happened, arms round each other, agape and awash with the new sensations of sex. Sirius had grinned at him, eyes half-hidden under his mess of hair and he had wrapped his arms around Remus, pulling him close, possessively sniffing his hair and murmuring words that Remus couldn’t quite hear.

It sounded like _mine_.

 _He had awoken the next morning to a quiet dormitory, the red curtains drawn fast around the bed. He looked up to see Sirius reading a battered yet elegantly bound hardback from his collection. Remus had rebound it for him, weeks ago, charming some old embossed leather to protect the well-read pages of Sirius’ favourite book. Remus peered over his shoulder, kissing the skin there and read aloud, right into his ear:_  

> _One noticed his hands, finely carved,_
> 
> _almost the colour of jade, and the fingernails,_
> 
> _pink and cultivated._
> 
> _He spoke of Art_
> 
> _and of poetry_
> 
> _and held us with descriptions_
> 
> _of the Masters._
> 
> _Often when walking_
> 
> _he sang fragments_
> 
> _of austere Spanish songs from the Court of Ferdinand, and quoted Dante_
> 
> _accurately and often._
> 
> _But in his lapel,_
> 
> _Discreetly,_
> 
> _he wore a sprig of asphodel._

_He had turned Sirius’ hand over in his, examining those fingernails, with the accent of dirt embedded deep in their beds, but the fingers surprisingly soft and cool. He had marvelled at the way the words of the poem had flowed together, the magic and magnificence of their meaning reflected in the enthralling concentration on Sirius’ face._

_‘Death,’ he had said, softly._

_‘Hmm?’ Remus asked, turning to face him properly._

_‘Why is he wearing a symbol of death? I’ve never understood it.’ Sirius mused, absently playing with Remus’ wrist._

_‘He’s sorry,’ replied Remus instinctively. ‘He might not know how to express it, but he’s sorry about something. He’s keeping it hidden.’_

_‘You’re probably right,’ said Sirius, casting the book aside, his sudden solemnity gone. Turning, he had pinned Remus’ wrists above his head, and pushed him gently down into the bed, a look of determination on his face as he bent to kiss him, black hair brushing his cheeks and grey eyes burning. Remus had forgotten entirely about that poem, and the austere Spanish songs and let himself be lost once again._

 

Now, Remus looks at his hands in the moonlight. Older, scarred, thin. Hands that had once held the dearest beating heart and thrumming skin of his lover, hands that have been transformed countless times by the moon, hands that have written screeds of letters, trying to make sense of the catastrophic culmination of those years of war. Hands that are now empty and a stranger to touch.

Giving himself over entirely t0 the pull of his memories, Remus rummages in the drawer for the last item he knows is there, the talisman of a time that he cannot let himself remember but cannot bear to forget. The glass vial is cool as he rolls it between the pads of his fingers, into the warmth of his palm. He presses it between his curled fingers, feeling the weight of the glass there, and the changing temperature of the glass. He notices its green hue and the worn cork, and wonders what happened to its contents, lost to the mysteries of that nebulous time before their world had ended.

_Lily had walked with him from the Hospital Wing. They hadn’t spoken much but she had handed him a bar of chocolate and the assuring sense that she wasn’t going to pry. He had accepted both gladly and they had wandered towards Gryffindor Tower, each with their own reasons for not wanting to enter. She had squeezed his hand in hers as they approached the portrait hole, and James had leapt from the sofa to greet them, Peter in his wake. Sirius was nowhere to be seen: the marks on James’ knuckles and the bags under his eyes indicated the kind of altercation that had punctuated Remus’ stay in the hospital wing. Lily had shot James one of her looks and he had followed her wordlessly to a corner. Remus barely acknowledged Peter, yearning only for his bed and the release of sleep, pulling his attention away from the conversation he didn’t want to have and the pain he didn’t want to feel._

_He’d walked into the dormitory to find the curtains drawn tight around Sirius’ bed. His heart had hardened in that moment and he bit his tongue to prevent himself giving in to the temptation to acquiesce to his demands for forgiveness, the owls, the visits, the litany of regret. He slumped into his own bed and lay back, staring at the red canopy above. Full to the brim with Painkilling Potion and Dreamless Sleep, he had closed his eyes and fallen into darkness._

_When he had awoken, there was a vial by his bed. A glass vial containing a sprig of asphodel._

_That night he had waited until they had all settled, til the breathing of the room had evened, then he had slipped out of his bed and into Sirius’, silencing him with a look of pure abandon and kissing his guilt away into a night of intense physicality that rendered them both reborn._

They never really spoke about it after that.

How big a sprig of asphodel would he need now, wonders Remus bitterly, as he places the vial back in the drawer. How deep a night of loving, that it could awaken him years on, how much would he have to do to make up for what he’d wrought on all of them. He carelessly slams the drawer shut and lies back once again on the flimsy sheets of his ramshackle bed, his jaw tight and his stomach uneasy. He has no Dreamless Sleep to spare, but his dwindling reserves of Firewhisky supply him with a warming, numbing suggestion of sleep, which soon takes over.

He will awaken the next morning to the tapping of an owl at the window, with a letter of green looped handwriting, beseeching an old friend to return to the building where it all happened, to take up a post he hasn’t ever considered, and, unwittingly, to embroil himself once again in the complexities of loving Sirius Black.

He dreams of a field of asphodel.


End file.
